


The Worst of Times (Not Really)

by capalxii



Category: The Thick of It (TV)
Genre: M/M, Post-Canon Fix-It, Post-Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-20
Updated: 2014-09-20
Packaged: 2018-02-18 02:10:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,361
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2331332
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/capalxii/pseuds/capalxii
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The monsters terrorizing the village are in love with each other. Post-series sort-of fluff, rating is for language not content.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Worst of Times (Not Really)

It was the worst of times.

That was it. There was no upside. One would be forgiven if one had thought there might have been a “best of times” to go along with it, or at the very least a “slightly-less-shit of times,” but no. It was pretty much just the worst of all fucking times, across the centuries, blasting through dimensional walls, proclaiming at the top of its temporal lungs just how terrible the times actually were.

Malcolm Tucker was in love. And so was Jamie MacDonald.

It was. The worst. Of times.

*

The first point to be made is that it had all started out as potentially the best of times. Malcolm Tucker had been arrested, and there were those who had pretended that this event would usher in a new golden age of transparency in governance and journalistic integrity.

But it didn’t, because as much as he had become the face of the machine he had never actually been the machine itself, and at any rate the case fell apart. The reasoning behind this collapse was never made clear, and a week afterward there was a new scandal to focus on, and two months later everybody had moved onto better and brighter things. It wasn’t quite a golden age, but it was an Age Without Malcolm, not that anyone in the outside world had ever really noticed the Age With Malcolm.

The first point to be made is that there was a sense of security that was about as false as it possibly could have been.

*

The second point to be made is that at some stage in the previous three years, Malcolm’s pet psychopath had disappeared, with no commentary or notice, and had not re-emerged until the trial had started. When the trial had started, everyone who had reason to voice an opinion (and many people who had no reason at all) had spurned Malcolm. Malcolm, for his part, remained silent, more used to the background than the front page, and unwilling—or unable, though nobody had bothered to ask or differentiate—to speak up more than once in his own defense. Scapegoating was not unfamiliar to him, though it had been some years since he had been the target, but he simply wasn’t up to combating it, and so it would have seemed to anyone casually following the trial that Malcolm had no allies and for good reason. At the beginning, Malcolm stood alone, or as alone as one could stand with an entire squad of highly paid lawyers at one’s back; the press coverage cheerfully highlighted just how separate and different he was from everyone else involved in media.

Many miles away, as the song goes, something crawled to the surface of a dark Scottish lake.

Or at least, that’s what most people assume happened.

*

The third point—the third point is where it gets a bit sticky. No good legal defense is complete without a good media team to back it up, especially not in high profile cases; Malcolm’s media team had been fine, trucking along and making all the noises Malcolm was paying them to make, but they didn’t spark. Not really. It was business as usual, and while his legal outlook was fine, his political one was not, and Malcolm had resigned himself to being less than a footnote within a year.

Until one day, from the mist and grime and fog, out slithered his long-lost pet psycho, back from the wilderness, a tiny rageful silhouette as he threw open the doors and strutted cock-first into the fray. Jamie’s CV—probably scribbled on the back of a paper place-mat with a pen that was rapidly losing ink—was blank for those three years as far as anyone could tell, and he had appeared from the aether as quickly as he had disappeared into it so long ago.

No bother, they had thought. Just one man, can’t do much to change the course of things. And there had been a quiet, underground murmuring of how little Malcolm had seemed to care at any rate, so even if Jamie could change things, it was highly unlikely that Malcolm would be willing to take advantage.

It was business as usual, until the worst thing happened.

*

Nobody noticed at first.

Who would notice? The lawyers were busy lawyering. The media team was busy not getting shanked by their new boss, who looked deceptively adorable until he threatened to tear your spleen out through your nostril. Sam was busy making sure Malcolm was fed and watered regularly—he’d hardly kept up with that himself when he was in good spirits, and so it was even more important for her to keep an eye on him now.

But after a short while, eagle-eyed Sam took her eagle-eyes off Malcolm long enough to notice that Jamie was dropping by more often with takeaway, that he was yelling (lovingly) (terrifyingly) (terrifyingly and lovingly) at Malcolm to get to bed at a more reasonable hour, that Jamie was actually taking him for walks as well, and that generally speaking, Jamie was having some kind of positive effect.

The morning she arrived at Malcolm’s home to find Jamie coming down the stairs wearing too-long pyjama bottoms and a too-big t-shirt was a good morning for her; it was, not coincidentally, also the morning she decided she didn’t need to come around in the mornings unannounced anymore, as Malcolm’s home was a one-bedroom flat and the only thing up the stairs was that one lone bedroom.

*

After Sam, nobody else noticed for another month or so. Occasionally there would be a photo of proven-innocent Malcolm at a nice restaurant with his curly-haired lieutenant, a minor article about a book deal, a casual mention at some party event about a new new-media start-up that Jamie may or may not have been involved in.

Then came the pillaging.

Jamie’s little start-up was, like the man himself, not as little as it seemed—and everyone who worked under him seemed to be made from the same mold, the same sort of feral wolf-smiling claw-bearing mold that he had been made from. This would have been bad enough, but there had been, at the beginning, some hope that he might have gotten bored, and gotten out of the day-to-day. He might have disappeared into the same mist from whence he’d come.

Except one day, a minister, and it didn’t really matter which one as they all, at this point, were equally pants-shittingly scared of what Jamie could do to them, noticed a thing. He noticed that Jamie had Malcolm in the room with him sometimes, and Malcolm looked at him with this certain dreamy look, the kind a serial killer might give a different but equally nasty serial killer that he admired—

This minister noticed that what Jamie was doing, this systematic destruction of entire political careers, this gleefully unapologetic burning of anything and everything that stepped even slightly out of line was…flirting. It was some perverse mating ritual, and the leaving of bodies on Malcolm’s doorstep was met with a warm embrace and the murmuring of sweet nothings against Jamie’s cheek.

The monster who raided their village in the night did it out of a sense of romance, and their skins were nothing but tokens for the monster’s beloved.

"Ah," the minister said with some poorly-timed appreciation, and he immediately regretted it as Jamie slowly turned to face him.

*

To say it was the worst of times requires an addendum: it was the worst of times for approximately ninety-nine percent of those who noticed that the Age of Malcolm had somehow morphed into the Age of Jamie Wooing Malcolm With the Ribcages of Those Who Jamie Feels Wronged Someone Somewhere.

For the other one percent—namely Sam, Jamie, Malcolm, Jamie’s mother, Jamie’s older brothers, Jamie’s younger sisters, most of Jamie’s aunts except the one who didn’t trust Malcolm on account of one time he turned down a slice of her prized famous-in-her-own-mind carrot cake—

For the other one percent, it was, yes, an ever so slightly less-shit of times.

And they rampaged happily ever after.


End file.
